Spendesk Makes Sales Outreach & Data Management Smarter with Hull

Results Summary

Make outbound sales efforts more intelligent through better data enrichment and segmentation capabilities

Save time by eliminating the need for CSVs to share data across systems and to conduct regular data cleansing

Simplify a CRM migration with clean, consolidated data

“We needed a solution for data enrichment that would help us better manage our data and push it between our tools. We had quite an isolated tool stack previously, and there was no real way to share data between systems. Hull offered the solution to that problem.” - Joe Gates, Sales Operations Manager at Spendesk

Spendesk is an all-in-one spending platform that is fundamentally changing the way finance teams track employee spend.

Supporting Process-Oriented Growth with Better Sales Data

Spendesk is a smart spend management software for modern businesses. With smart cards, expense reports and real-time insights, Spendesk allows employees to easily pay for what they need while the finance team remains in control.

As a process-oriented, growth-driven company, Spendesk saw an opportunity to improve sales performance through better data. Specifically, Spendesk wanted to improve outbound sales outreach by making it easy for salespeople to access customer data stored in its CRM and marketing automation systems.

According to Joe Gates, Sales Operations Manager at Spendesk, the company had several best-in-class technologies, including Hubspot, Segment, Clearbit, and Pipl, but each tool was fairly isolated. Perhaps the biggest challenge for the team was syncing data between Hubspot and their CRM solution, as this required significant manual effort.

Faced with these challenges and the imperative to make sales outreach smarter, Spendesk began to search for a solution that could improve data management, enrichment, and cleansing.

Searching for the Right Technology

Spendesk’s Head of Growth began the search for the right technology to connect the company’s tech stack and improve data management, enrichment, and cleansing. Throughout this search, the Spendesk team focused on finding a solution that could unlock sales growth by arming the team with smarter data and eliminating the manual workflows required to share data across systems in its current setup.

This search led Spendesk straight to Hull, which checked all the boxes, including natively integrating with the solutions in Spendesk’s tech stack and simplifying the connections between those solutions. Equally as noteworthy for the Spendesk search team, Hull provided an easy implementation.

As Gates puts it: “The Hull customer success team felt like an extension of our own team. They always had time for us and really knew what they were talking about, making them an extremely valuable asset.”

Making Sales (and Beyond) More Intelligent with Data

Since implementing Hull, Spendesk has achieved its goal of more intelligent sales through streamlined data connections and then some.

At the highest level, Hull allows the Spendesk sales team to better segment their accounts into very specific audiences (e.g. based on contact title or type of company) for smarter, more targeted outreach. Hull makes this improved segmentation possible through easy data enrichment and data cleansing.

On the data enrichment front, users can enter any additional information they have on prospect accounts and contacts into Hull and then disperse that information to other go-to-market systems. This process is much easier and faster than the manual one the team had to use previously.

In terms of data cleansing, Hull has eliminated the need for CSVs to manage data and saved the team significant time as a result. “The biggest benefit of Hull is being able to migrate data from one channel to another pretty much seamlessly while cleaning up all the mess like duplicates and users without email addresses in the process. I used to have to import CSVs five times a day, so the difference with Hull is staggering. Each CSV would take a half an hour to an hour to prepare and import, but with Hull, I could do it in five minutes” Gates says. Hull effectively allowed Joe to shift nearly 20 hours of his week from manual CSV manipulation to more strategic projects.

This time savings and simplified passing of data ended up helping Spendesk significantly during a recent CRM migration. Gates shares that what would have taken months of work to migrate data from Spendesk’s old CRM system to its new one ended up taking under three weeks with Hull.

Finally, Spendesk has found an unexpected benefit from Hull for its customer success team. Spendesk now uses Hull to trigger notifications to customer success managers when risk flags pop up on customer accounts. Having accurate data pushed to the team in real time helps them better understand what their accounts are doing and enables them to quickly reach out to mitigate any risks.

Says Gates: “From sales to customer success, we now have access to data in real time that allows us to work much smarter. Thanks to Hull, we now have the power to connect and manage our data and can easily take action off what it tells us.”

Previously, making sure one CSV was good and ready to push took up to an hour, but that was the only way to pass data between systems. Now, with Hull, I can build a segment and push it anywhere in about five minutes. The time savings is incredible.